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End of the Early Middle Ages
The '''Early Middle Ages' lasted from about 476 AD until roughly 1000 AD. It began with the decline of the classical civilisations, not just in Europe, but in China and India also around somewhat similar dates; the Greco-Roman world, the Persian world, Maurya-Gupta India, and Qin-Han China. The year 1000 will do as a rough marker for the mid-point between the collapse of these foundational cultures, and the beginning of the age of truly world history around 1453. The "Byzantines" of Emperor Basil II's day knew they were very different from other men and were proud of it. They belonged to a particular civilization; some of them, at least, thought it was the best conceivable. They were not unique in this. The same was true of men in other parts of the globe; in for instance Western Christendom and the Islamic world. Long before the year 1000, civilization had been at work in every continent, except Australasia, deepening and quickening the powerful, distinctive, often self-conscious and largely independent traditions at work. Their differences were to go on deepening for another five centuries or so, until by about 1500 mankind was probably more diversified than ever before or since. One result was that Chinese, Indian, European and Islamic civilizations all lived independently long enough to leave ineradicable traces in the ground-plan of our world. After four centuries of disunity, China was reunified by the short-lived Sui Dynasty in 581, and under the succeeding Tang Dynasty (618-907) and Song Dynasties (960-1279) entered one of the most progressive and stable periods of Chinese history. Through military campaigns and diplomatic maneuvers, the Tang dominated the East and Central Asia, and the Silk Road entered its Golden Age of commerce between East and West. Xi'an was the centre of this most cosmopolitan of empires, with a population of perhaps one-million, and merchants from far and wide mingling with the locals. Tang China never really recovered from the An Lushan Rebellion in the mid-8th-century, and gradually became ungovernable and disintegrated. The Song Dynasty ended the disunity in 960, ushering in China's most creative period. While militarily weaker than its predecessor, Song China was the economically richest, most technologically skilled, and most populous country on earth. Between the 9th and 11th century, the population of China almost doubled in size to more than 100 million, growth made possible by a steady improvement in agriculture which produced abundant surpluses. The Song were the first government in world history to issue paper money and establish a permanent standing navy to support flourishing maritime trade. Civilized Chinese life continued to thrive even after the Song lost control of northern China in 1127, but could do nothing about barbarian of a different calibre in the late-13th-century; the Mongols. Meanwhile through influence from China, Japan emerged during the Asuka Period (538–710) as a clearly centralized state based on Confucian and Buddhist ideas. Chinese influence waned shortly after the capital was moved to Heian (modern Kyoto) in 794, allowing a more wholly Japanese culture to emerge. The luxury and delight of Kyoto at this time has been impressed on the Western imagination by two of the greatest works of Japanese literature, The Tale of Genji and the better known The Pillow Book. 11th-century Kyoto had a population of perhaps 100,000, making it far larger than any Western European cities at the time. For the Indian subcontinent, the Early Middle Ages were defined by a complex and fluid network of regional kingdoms, and cultural diversity. The disintegration of central power meant religions had to vigorously competing for royal favour and popular support. In the end Hinduism prospered and Buddhism dwindled, since the Brahmins were able administrators, and had more pragmatic ideas about statecraft. In the 9th-century, three powerful regional powers contested for control of the resource-rich Ganges Valley, but none were able to consistently control lands much beyond their core region for long periods. After the 10th-century, Muslims using swift-horse cavalry repeatedly overran northern India, eventually leading to the establishment of the Islamic Delhi Sultanate in 1206. History China during the Early Middle Ages The classical chapter of China's history ended with the collapse of the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD). It was followed by centuries of chaos known as the Period of Disunion (184-581), during which a strong division developed between northern and southern China. Northern China was fragmented and ruled by numerous dynasties, most of them founded by barbarians. None of these states lasted very long until the Xianbei tribe founded the Northern Wei Dynasty (386-534), which by 439 had secured control of all the lands north of the Yangtze River. Meanwhile, the south was ruled by a sequence of five Chinese dynasties, all centered at Nanjing, that beginning with the Eastern Jin (317-420 AD) and followed by four short-lived successors. Due to its climate and water-supply, the agricultural potential of the south was greater and its economy prospered. But southern rulers had to contend with a powerful, entrenched aristocracy, who accumulated large estates often worked by refugees from the war-ravaged north. The stage was set for the reunification of China during the reign of Emperor Xiaowen (471-99), when the Northern Wei undertook sweeping reforms intended to strengthen the state: the capital moved to Luoyang, the old capital of the Han; agricultural land redistribution was successfully implemented, as previously attempted centuries earlier by the usurper Wang Mang; and a drastic policy of Sinicization was instituted, to make the multi-ethnic state easier to govern. Xianbei tribesmen, who formed the bulk of the military force, resented the growth of Chinese influence and rebelled in 524, plunging the north into 50 years of constant warfare. Yang Jian, the man who finally brought three centuries of disunity to an end, was a member of a powerful Han Chinese family, who had served with apparent distinction the branch of Northern Wei that came out on top and reunified the north in 577. In 580, Jian seized power as regent for a child emperor, and then assumed the imperial title himself, as Emperor Wendi (581-604) meaning "Cultured Emperor". To secure his position, he murdered 59 members of the royal family in a bloody purge. The Sui Dynasty (581-618)' '''played a far more pivotal role in Chinese history than its short span would suggest, setting-up many institutions that were to be adopted by their successors. Wendi established his capital at Xi'an, the old Qin and Han capital, which was rebuilt on an unprecedented scale; this great city remained the seat of government until the 10th-century. He prepared for the final step toward reunifying the whole country with exemplary thoroughness; repairing the Great Wall and sowing discord among the steppe nomads to protect the northern frontier. Then in 589, having amassed a massive army of over half-a-million troops, he overwhelmed the last southern dynasty, which put-up only token resistance. With China a single state once again, Wendi immediately set in motion his grand design of centralisation with drastic reforms: aristocratic hereditary rights were quickly abolished, and replaced by a bureaucracy answerable to the throne; Confucian education and the examination system was restored for bureaucrats; the operation of government was streamlined with a cabinet of able men organised as "''Three Departments and Six Ministries" to separately draft, review, and implement policies; the agricultural land redistribution system already imposed in the north was extended to all of China; a revised and less complex law code was promulgated; and the coinage was standardised across the realm. The late reign of Wendi was a period of prosperity with vast agricultural surpluses that supported rapid population growth. While the Sui revived Confucianism to win favour with the scholar-elite, Wendi was himself a devout Buddhist, devoting much effort to building Buddhist pagodas throughout the land. His son Emperor Yangdi (604-18) undertook on an even more ambitious project; the construction of the 1100-mile-long Grand Canal linking the Yellow River and Yangtze River. The immediate aim was for transporting grain and taxes to the capital, but in the long term this reliable inland waterway was to be a most important factor for maintaining a unified China. It quickly became a bustling thoroughfare of internal trade. The canal was nevertheless an immense undertaking that employed masses of conscripted labour, working under appalling conditions. Further hardship was caused by a series of massive invasions of the Korean Peninsula that overstretched resources and failed disastrously. Widespread popular revolts broke out against Emperor Yangdi in 613. By late 617, he was forced to flee his capital with his court in tow down the canal to temporary safety, when Li Yuan, one of the Sui generals who had risen in rebellion, occupied Xi'an. A year later, Yangdi was assassinated by one of his advisors, and Li Yuan seized power for himself, as Emperor Gaozu (618-26), founder of the new Tang Dynasty (618-907). Under the Tang, China entered her most dynamic era; a Golden Age both politically and culturally to rival the first two centuries of the Han Dynasty. Gaozu prudently maintained and improved upon the bureaucracy initiated by the Sui, while dispensing with extravagant building projects and military operations. This can be seen especially in the Tang Law Code (624) which drew heavily on Sui concepts but expanded them; it became the basis for later codes not only in China but elsewhere in East Asia. Despite his effective reign, Gaozu was deposed by his son, who also killed his two brothers and several nephews to ascend to the throne as Emperor Taizong (626-49). After this bloody coup however, he proved himself one of the greatest emperors in China's history. The defining achievement of his reign was destroying the Eastern Turkic Khaganate as a power, making the Tang the dominant power in East and Central Asia. He also presided over an era of internal renewal, surrounding himself with a group of unusually able advisors. He is traditionally regarded as a co-founder of the dynasty, laying the foundation for the dynasty to flourish for a century beyond his reign. Taizong was succeeded by a unique figure; Wu Zetian (649-705), the only female emperor in Chinese history. Lady Wu first entered court as the lowly concubines of Emperor Taizong. Sent to a convent after his death, she was brought her back to court by his impressionable son, Emperor Gaozong (649–68), who had long been in love with her. According to legend, she became empress of China by murdering her own infant daughter, and blaming it on his wife who was then exiled. Lady Wu played the role of the shy, respectable emperor's wife in public, but she was the real power behind the throne when Gaozong suffered a stroke in 660. When he died, she initially maintained control through her sons, until she felt secure enough to claim the throne herself in 690. Although a controversial figure, her reign laid the foundation for the success of her son, Emperor Xuanzong (712-756), during whose long reign the Tang reached the zenith of its power. Imperial control extended once again over most of the territories previously held by the Han Dynasty, from the desert oases along the Silk Road of Bukhara and Samarkand, to northern Korea in the east, north Vietnam in the south, and well north of the Great Wall. Beyond China's borders, princes as far away as Nepal and Herat (modern-day Afghanistan) paid tribute. A century of domestic tranquility had stimulated rapid growth in agricultural productivity and population; Tang records suggest a population of about 50 million people. Trade boomed within the empire. During the Sui, there had been two great metropolitan markets, Xi’an and Luoyang; now every provincial capital became the centre of a large consumer population, and a network of rural market towns grew up. Under the Tang Pax Sinica, the Silk Road entered its Golden Age of commerce between East and West, with the Byzantine Empire becoming a prime buyer of Chinese silk. It was also during the Tang that its maritime equivalent flourished, the Indian Ocean Trade network, and a strong Chinese presence could be found in India, the Persia Gulf and beyond. The Tang rulers brought a new openness to foreigners and their ideas. Xi'an was the centre of this most cosmopolitan of empire, with a population of perhaps one-million, and its own foreign quarter where merchants from Central Asia, India and the Middle East could be seen mingling with the locals. Tolerance of foreigners allowed alien faiths a foothold, including Nestorian Christianity, Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Islam. Buddhism, adopted by the imperial family, continued to flourish, becoming thoroughly sinicized, with the traditional stupa evolving into a specifically Chinese form; that of the pagoda. The Tang Dynasty is well remembered for the era’s contributions to the arts, culture and science. Over 50,000 poems, plays, short stories, and other literary works survive from the period; three of China's most renowned poets, Li Bai (b. 701), Du Fu (b. 712), and Wang Wei (b. 701), were contemporaries during Xuanzong's reign.Potters discovered the technique of the thin white translucent ware still known today as "fine china" in some English-speaking countries. It quickly became highly prized in the Islamic world, and Europeans would go to great lengths to learn its manufacturing secrets in the early 18th-century. In the realm of cartography, there were further advances culminating in the famous Hua Yi Tu map completed in 801, which charted the entire Tang empire and beyond into the barbarian world in great detail; it measuring 33 feet by 30 feet. Manual woodblock-printing also began on a large scale under Emperor Taizong. The oldest surviving full-length printed book dates from towards the end of the Tang, a Buddhist holy text known as the Diamond Sūtra(868). The Tang was largely a period of progress and stability, until a series of shocks in the mid-8th-century that the dynasty would never fully recovered from. First in 742, Emperor Xuanzong fell deeply in love with one of the great femme fatales of Chinese history, the concubine Lady Yang (d. 756), and paid less and less attention to the running of his empire. Lady Yang persuaded the emperor to promote members of her dissolute family to high government positions, who neglected their duties; it is hard to say whether they were more corrupt or more incompetent. This was combined with a reversal of military fortunes, when the Tang western expansion was checked by a shattering defeat against the Abbasid Caliphate at the Battle of Talas (751). But the most important of these shocks was the devastating An Lushan Rebellion (755-763). General An Lushan, a former favourite of Xuanzong, saw the Yang family's abuses as a sign that the Tang had lost the Mandate of Heaven. Commanding some of the best troops in the Chinese army, he marched on Xi'an which he captured in 756. While Emperor Xuanzong was fleeing the capital with his court and household for the south, his imperial bodyguard mutinied and refused to go any further unless the Yang family were all put to death; Xuanzong's beloved Lady Yang was strangled with a length of silk. The love story was later romanticised in Bai-Juji's famous poem, Song of the Everlasting Sorrow (806). Emperor Daizong (762-79) crushed the rebellion in 763, but the traditional respect given the emperor and the country were in ruins; some historians estimate 13 million people died, not only heavy direct casualties but civilian deaths from dislocation, famine and disease. The emperor was unable to prevent Arab raiders impertinently arriving along the trade route of the south China coast, and plundering Canton in 758, nor Tibetan raiders plundering Xi'an in 763. The next 150 years were characterised by violent struggles between powerful factions. One such clash was between the central government and provincial governors who had been granted huge amounts of military and tax-collecting power to crush the rebellion. This was a permanent change in the relationship between the government and the provinces that steadily became more and more autonomous. Emperor Dezong (780-805) tried to quell the rebellious provinces by placing palace eunuchs in command of the imperial army, but well-placed to advance their own interests, they frequently took the opportunity, thus introducing a new faction. A political and cultural recovery eventually did occur under Emperor Xianzong (805–820), who subdued all but two of the regional warlords. However, his successors proved less capable and more interested in the pleasures of court, allowing a resurgence of the eunuchs’ power. By the late-9th-century, there was constant fratricidal strife between eunuchs and Confucian officials at court. Another factional clash was between traditional Chinese values, and openness to foreigners and their ideas. There was some backlash against Buddhism particular, with some blaming what they called self-indulgent spiritualism for the empires woes. Emperor Wuzong (840-46) persecuted all religions other than Daoism and Confucianism, destroying 4,000 Buddhist monasteries, together with many more temples, and forcing 260,000 monks and nuns back into secular life. The suppression was short-lived, but Buddhism never regained the power and prestige in China that it had enjoyed up until that time. By the 860s, provincial armies, lawless gangs, and peasant unrest combined to make the country ungovernable. The final blow to the Tang came with the Huang Chao Rebellion (874-84), led by a former government worker who was unable to pass the imperial examination, and turned instead to overthrowing the government; it devastated the country, cost over 100,000 lives, and destroyed the capital city of Xi'an. In 907 the Tang Dynasty was ended when overthrown by the first of five dynasties that rapidly succeeded one another. But they only controlled the traditional Imperial heartland in the north, while some ten regional warlords controlled the rest of China; most had been de facto independent kingdoms long before 907. Eventually one dynasty established a sixth regime in the northern heartland on a more firm footing; the Song Dynasty (960-1279) founded by Emperor Taizu (960-76). He was succeeded by his even abler younger brother Emperor Taizong (976-97) and the stability provided by these two long reigns gave the dynasty the start it needed to become one of the most successful in China’s history. By 979, the first two emperors had conquered and reunified most of China proper, although large swaths of the outer territories within the Great Wall were occupied by sinicized nomadic rulers. Song China was thus smaller than under the Tang, and militarily weaker, compelled to pay huge annual tributes to keep them at bay their northern neighbours; the ethnic Khitan Liao Dynasty (907–1125); the Khitan were the first to make their capital in what is now Beijing. A similar situation arose with the Tangut of the Western Xia (1038–1227). Although this tribute was a strain of the treasury, much of its value ended-up coming back to China in the form of payment for Chinese exports. For the first half of the dynasty, known as Northern Song (960–1127), the capital was at Kaifeng, strategically located where the Grand Canal joined the Yellow River. The Song emperors ensured political stability by using a variety of shrewd checks-and-balances to make sure no regional commander ever became power enough to threaten the throne, and giving greater authority to the civilian administration. As a result, this was the heyday of the Confucians. Ever since the Han Dynasty, scholar officials had supposedly been selected on merit in the civil-service examinations, but nepotism and corruption often frustrated this intention. Under the Song, the search for talent becomes rigorous, and talent became virtually the only means of entry and promotion. Despite its relatively weak military strength, the Song was one of the most creative periods of Chinese history, when all the old ways were questioned and challenged. Between the 9th and 11th century, the population of China almost doubled in size to more than 100 million, growth made possible by a steady improvement in agriculture which produced plentiful surpluses: if farmers could cultivate barren land the could claim title over it; there were improvements in farming tools and higher yielding grains; and a variety of early ripening rice was adopted that made two crops a year the norm. Urbanisation really took off under the Song, with a rich urban-culture; Kaifeng, Suzhou, Hangzhou and Canton all had populations of more than a million. The Song era is more remarkable still for a surge in economic activity. The government continued to enforce monopolies on certain market items, but generally made fewer claims than in earlier dynasties. Merchant families, private businesses, and handicraft industries became much more central to the Chinese economy. As agriculture became more efficient, farmers increasingly focused on cash crops such as cotton, hemp, sugarcane, tea, and mulberry trees to breed silkworms. Efficient road and canal routes saw the emergence of the truly nationwide market-economy; the most prosperous and advanced in the medieval world. This period witnessed the establishment of the first government issued paper-printed money in history. With the Silk Road contested by nomadic groups, for the first time maritime trade using the India Ocean Trade network began to exceed the volume of overland trade. Giant Chinese junks equipped with the sternpost rudder, as many as six masts, compasses, charts, and instruments traded abroad with the South East Pacific, the Hindu, the Islamic, and the East African worlds. Merchants even had insurance to hedge the risk of maritime trade. To protect and support the multitude of ships, China found it necessary to establish the world's first standing navy. If the Tang Dynasty were the first to print books, then it was during the Song that China experienced a proliferation of books, eagerly consumed by an increasingly literate middle class. Literature boomed during the period, and revolutionised the spread of knowledge and education. It was thus a direct catalyst in the rise of social mobility, and expansion of the Confucian scholar elites. The Song pioneered the innovation of movable type printing, but the Chinese script with so many characters posed significant challenges; it was finally achieved in Korea some time in the 13th-century. Chinese metallurgy also experienced a revolution, with the use of coal replacing charcoal in blast furnaces for smelting. By the 1070s, China was able to produce as much iron as Europe would be producing in the 17th-century. Yet another Chinese phenomenon seems to have emerged during the Song; foot-binding, the custom of binding up a high-born girl’s feet in cloths so that they would never grow larger than the size of a fist. We still do not know exactly how the custom began, but for the next few centuries it became the norm. It produced such grotesque deformations that it could leave a lady almost incapable of walking. The spirit of innovation impacted virtually everything, even how war was waged. The Song were the first to apply the revolutionary technology of gunpowder to the battlefield; Chinese alchemists had known its formula as early as the 2nd-century. At this early stage, the military use of gunpowder was limited to fire arrows, grenades, and bombs lobbed from catapults. Unfortunately for the Song, these weapons only really came of age during the time of the later Mongol Yuan Dynasty. The troubles of the Song, came from their own hubris. In 1115, the Jurchen tribes revolted against the Liao Dynasty in the north, and established their own Jin Dynasty (1115-1234) further to the north-east; the Jurchen were ancestors of the Manchu. Seeing an opportunity to rid themselves of the troublesome Liao, the Song and Jin agreed to join forces to annihilated them. Unfortunately, despite achieving their goal, the Song were rather shown up for their own military weakness. The Juchen soon turned on the Song, overwhelming northern China, capture the Song capital of Kaifeng in 1127, and carrying off the emperor along with most of the Imperial court. Despite the loss of huge swathes of territory, a Song prince who escaped the fate of his house reestablished a new capital at the other end of the Grand Canal, in Hangzhou. Here the Southern Song (1127–1279) continued in territory reduced to a mere fraction of the Tang. Fortunately, they still controlled the richest part of the former state, enough to be the basis of a strong economy and a rich urban culture for another 150 years. Civilized Chinese life continued to thrive until the arrival of another intruder of a different calibre from all previous northern barbarians. Though not Chinese, the conqueror of the Song became perhaps the only emperor of China whose name is widely known; Kublai Khan of the Mongols. Japan until the Early Middle Ages In Shinto mythology, the two deities Izanagi and tIzanami came down to a watery world in order to create land. Droplets from Izanagi’s jewelled spear solidified into the land now known as Japan, and the deities then populated the new land with gods and spirits, among them Japan's supreme deity, the sun goddess Amaterasu. The gods proliferated and had many dramatic adventures, establishing such basic patterns of life as day and night, summer and winter. Eventually Amaterasu sent her great-great grandson Jimmu was to become the first emperor of Japan, reputedly in 660 BC. Such is the seminal creation myth of Japan. More certainly, the earliest firm evidence of human habitation on the Japanese archipelago go back only 35,000 years or so, arriving from the Asian mainland. The early history of Japan, before the appearance of its own written records in the mid-7th-century, has been pieced together from archeological evidence and Chinese and Korean sources, and remained the subject of a lot of historical debate. The people who we today call the Japanese are referred to as the Yayoi culture, who effectively invaded from continental Asia via the Korean peninsula from around the 4th-century BC, inaugurating the Yayoi Period (400 BC-250 BC). This period might have begun centuries earlier, and may have involved as much integrating with the indigenous peoples as overwhelming them. The Yayoi culture brought with them advanced pottery, metallurgy, and farming techniques, most notably highly productive wet rice-farming. They gradually spread eastwards over the southern and central islands, where laid the mildest climate and best agricultural prospects, pushing the indigenous peoples ever further north; except for the minority Ainu people of northern Japan, the present-day Japanese are overwhelmingly of Yayoi descent. The introduction of rice-growing and the fishing potential of Japanese waters had already made it possible for this mountainous country to feed a disproportionately large population, perhaps as high as 4.5 million by the mid-3rd-century. The earliest work to mention Japan, the Book of the Han (82 AD), notes the frequency of warfare between more than a hundred rival clans or petty-kingdoms. Japanese rulers were beginning their first attempts at international relations by the end of the period; envoy and tribute missions to Chinese territory are recorded in 57, 107, 238, 243, and 248 AD. The most famous figure of the period is the shaman-queen Queen Himiko of Yamatai (d. 248). Scholars are divided as to whether Himiko was the overlord of many petty-kingdoms or just the queen of one powerful kingdom; they even disagree on the location of Yamatai. The leader of any clan had more than a secular role, for they had an important function in Japan's indigenous religion, Shinto; a version of the shamanism with a profusion of local and personal gods and spirits. How the unification of Japan was first achieved during the Kofun Period (c. 250–538) has inspired many hypotheses, none of them entirely convincing. What is certain is that from the mid-3rd-century onwards, the clan occupying the Yamato plain (now known as Nara, south of Osaka) gradually established sufficient administrative and military power for its chieftain to be seen as emperor, with an ill-defined supremacy and an ancestry traced back to the sun goddess Amaterasu. The symbol of their growing power was the practice of burying leaders in large keyhole-shaped mounded tombs known as kofun. As time went on, they were built on an ever grander scale, indicating that the Yamato rulers could command tremendous human and material resources. Emperor Kinmei (539–71 AD) is the first Japanese emperor for whom contemporary sources are able to assign verifiable dates. According to the lineage of legend, he was the 29th emperor claiming descent from the legendary Emperor Jimmu and thus from the sun goddess Amaterasu. Despite a number of perilous moments, Japan continues to have the longest unbroken monarchic line in the world, and the notion that the emperor descends from a deity persisted throughout the millennia until the immediate aftermath of World War II, when Emperor Hirohito was forced to declare his humanity to the nation. The Asuka Period (538-710) is characterised by an influx of influences from the highest example of civilization of which the Japanese were aware, and possibly the finest in the world at that time; that of imperial China. By consciously emulating China, Japan hoped to be recognised as a civilised country; one of the major themes of Japanese history is her complex and often changing relationship with China. The period began in 538 (or 552) with the introduction of Buddhist religion via Korea; although Buddhism originated in India, it was seen by the Japanese as a Chinese religion. Despite some resistance, Buddhism was promoted by the ruling class and gained widespread acceptance. Imported concurrently with Buddhism were other elements of Chinese culture such as writing, classic Confucian texts, medicine, weaving, irrigation, temple art and architecture, and sophisticated techniques of statecraft that would serve to bolster the Yamato state. The most significant ruler of the period was Prince Shōtoku, the powerful regent to his aunt Empress Suiko (592–628) until his death in 622. Shōtoku is credited with reforming and centralising government on the Chinese model by, amongst other things, authoring the Seventeen-Article Constitution, a Confucian-inspired code of conduct for officials and citizens, laying the groundwork for a bureaucratic state. Official rank, however, did tend to be hereditary rather than on merit, a preference of the Japanese ruling class against which the Confucian tradition of examinations could make little headway. He also promoted Buddhism, describing it is these terms, "Shinto, since its roots spring from the Kami (spirits), came into existence simultaneously with the heaven and the earth, and thus expounds the origin of human beings. Confucianism, being a system of moral principles, is coeval with the people and deals with the middle stage of humanity. Buddhism, the fruit of principles, arose when the human intellect matured; it explains the last stage of man." These reforms nevertheless occurred in parallel with the sidelining of Yamato emperor by powerful nobles at court who all came from one family; the Soga clan. They achieved this by cleverly marrying their daughters to the princes nominated to the throne, and over time became the dominant force in the court, with the emperor as a mere figurehead; pioneering a recurring theme of Chinese history. In 645, the Soga clan were overthrown in a coup orchestrated by the imperial family in alliance with Fujiwara no Kamatari (d. 669), the founder of the Fujiwara clan; in due course the Fujiwara would dominate the emperors in a similar way. There was more than political significance in the change. Far-reaching reforms followed along Confucian lines, known as the Taika Reforms: all land in Japan was nationalised and redistributed equally to cultivators; a census of all households was compiled as the basis for a new and fairer system of taxation, in kind or labour rather than hard currency; and the law was codified for the first time. The true aim of these reforms was to continued the trend towards absolute rule by the centralised bureaucracy of the imperial court, and to break the existing system of the great clans. Meanwhile envoys were dispatched to China to learn seemingly everything, from literature to architecture, from medicine to printing. Until the early 8th-century, Shinto tenets on purity ordained that the imperial court relocate to a new city following the death of each emperor. However, the increasing weight of imperial bureaucracy now suggested the need for a permanent capital. In 710, the government constructed a grandiose new capital at Nara, designed in the same regular and well-defined grid layout as the T'ang capital at Xi'an. During the Nara Period (710–794), the fashion for all things Chinese was at its peak, as was the influence of Buddhism. Major temples were built at Nara, such as the Tōdai-ji (c. 752) with its Great Buddha Hall, containing the largest bronze sculpture of the Buddha in the world. The period also produced arguably the two most famous and important works of Japanese literature ever written; the Kojiki (712) and Nihon Shoki (720) histories, with their Shinto creation myth and royal genealogy that legitimised the imperial dynasty through claims of divine descent. At first, the Japanese wrote using the Chinese writing system, but during the 7th-century gradually developed a written form of the native language, which appropriated Chinese characters for their phonetic value rather than their semantic meaning to provide. During this period, the ordinary people did anything but flourish. Agriculture techniques were still primitive, and insufficient to prevent frequent crop failures and famines. Adding to these woes, there were smallpox epidemics from 735 to '37 that killed at least 25% of the population. This began the process of dismantling the Taika land reforms, with peasants preferring the greater security of working for landed aristocrats. By the end of the 8th-century, the Buddhist temples of Nara had risen to a position of such political dominance that Emperor Kammu (781–806) decided to move the capital to escape them. He first shifted the capital to Nagaoka, but following several inauspicious disasters, he suddenly shifted it again, this time to Heian, known today as Kyoto. Like Nara before it, the new capital was newly built closely modelled on the Chinese example of Xi'an. It was to remain Japan’s capital for more than a thousand years, though not necessarily as the centre of actual power. It was early in the Heian Period (794–1185) that the emperors, although still considered divine, became once again sidelined by one powerful family; the Fujiwara clan. In the 6th-century, the founder of the Fujiwara had been prominent in the ending of the dominance of the Soga clan, and now, two centuries later, his descendants dominated the imperial court to an even greater extend. The Fujiwara had intermarried with the imperial family, and usually acted as regents for child emperors. In 877, they had created for themselves a new office called Kampaku, usually translated as "chief chancellor", which ensured the Fujiwara still pulled the political strings at court when the emperor reached adulthood. For two centuries, the Fujiwara maintain hereditary control of the government through a simple device; they reserved for their family the right to provide brides for the imperial house. By tradition, the son of such a marriage would be raised with his mother's family, and with skilful manipulation youthful emperors were dominated by Fujiwara mothers or wives. Emperors were then encourage to retire early to a life of ease in a Buddhist monastery; since their imperial duties chiefly entailed wearisome ritual, most were happy to do so. The success of the Fujiwara clan in maintaining this system depended partly on the brilliance of the court life over which they preside in Kyoto, which enticed high nobles into the role of courtiers in the capital; reminiscent of the court of Louis XIV. By all accounts, Heian Period saw a great cultural and artistic flowering among the aristocracy in Kyoto. Chinese influence became less prominent during the 9th-century decline of the Tang Dynasty, and though the foundations of Japanese culture remained Chinese, the emergence of a more distinctively Japanese style accelerated. High society in the capital was sophisticated, elegant and more concerned with artistic pursuits and etiquette than of sexual morality. The court life of the time was brilliantly depicted in two of the greatest works of Japanese literature, both written by court-ladies, The Tale of Genji (c. ''1021), and better known The Pillow Book (1002). It showed a world where courtiers indulged in amusements, such as guessing flowers by their scent, building extravagant follies, mastering board games such as ''Go, and sparing no expense to indulge in the latest luxury. As in China, poetry was considered an essential element of civilized life, and the competitive writing of verses was a social pastime. Besides literature, the period also produced especially fine painting in the uniquely Japanese style called Yamato-e, characterised by angular lines, vivid colours, and great decorative details. One of the more unusual aspects of Heian Japan was the importance of beauty. The male courtly ideal included a faint mustache or thin goatee, while a courtly woman's formal dress included a complex twelve-layered kimono; both men and women powdered their faces and blackened their teeth. By the end of the period, Kyoto had grown to a population of perhaps 100,000, making it much larger than most European cities at the time. While the great nobles immersed themselves in courtly pleasures and intrigues, out in the real world of the provinces, powerful military forces were developing. The reforms of the 7th-century gradually broke-down from the 9th, with the equitable redistribution of land slowly whittled away by noblemen with influence at court, who accumulated private manor estates as payment for carrying out their duties. The provincial nobility, who managed these estates for absentee landlords in Kyoto, were increasingly left to their own devices, recruiting private armies to protect themselves and exploit their neighbours. By the mid-12th century, Japan descended into a full-scale civil-war, from which the Minamoto Shoguns would ascend to rulers of the new militaristic Japan of the Samurai elites. India during the Early Middle Ages India's medieval period is typically taken to begin with the slow collapse of the Gupta Empire from about 480 to 550. For five unsettled centuries, India fragmented into several dynasties ruling large areas for long periods, as well as many smaller kingdoms, often paying some form of tribute to larger states. The historian John Keay puts the typical number of dynasties within the subcontinent at any one time at between 20 and 40, not including very petty-kingdoms. Each of the regional empires aspired to imperial status, but no ruler was able to consistently control regions much beyond their core area for long. The sweeping upheavals and rearrangements which stud this confusion make agreement between historians about what was happening in India difficult; even the chronology is still largely conjectural. Only the general processes stand out. The most dramatic of these was the decline of Buddhism on the Indian subcontinent. All three Indian religious traditions - Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism - benefited from large polities. Although the Guptas were themselves devout Hundus, they recognised that the maintenance of their empire lay in cordial relations with all believers, so lavished patronage and donations on thriving Buddhist and Jain cultures as well. The regionalisation of India after 550 AD led to the loss of patronage, and to vigorous competition between the faiths.for royal favour and popular support. Hinduism and Buddhism were particularly marked by evolution to broaden their appeal. In Hinduism, a new popular emotionalism was associated with the two leading cults of Shiva and Vishnu with devotional hymns; the first songs and music in the Tamil language were composed in the 6th-century, and imitated all over India. An expanded mythology was created in this period, including Bhagavata Purana and Vishnu Purana with legends of Krishna, while Padma Purana and Kurma Purana expressed reverence for Vishnu, Shiva and Shakti with equal enthusiasm. There was a rural movement, whereby village shrines, at which local deities were worshipped, were easily assimilated into Hindu cults by the belief that gods might appear in more than one incarnation. A negative point is a new strictness and rigidity of the Caste System, with intensified subordination of lower castes and especially women, with an upsurge of child-marriage and the practice called Suttee (self-immolation of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres). The new development within Buddhism was the rise of Mahayana Buddhism, focused upon a Buddha who was effectively a divine saviour who might be worshipped. The human system of self-discipline and contemplation Gautama had taught was now increasingly confined to a minority of Theravada Buddhist (orthodox), the followers of Mahayana winning conversions among the masses. One sign of this was the proliferation of statues and representations of the Buddha, a practice hitherto restrained by the Buddha’s prohibition of idol-worship. Mahayana Buddhism eventually spread along the central Asian trade routes to China and Japan, while the more traditional Theravada Buddhism did better in south-eastern Asia and Indonesia. The evolution within Buddhism was more problematic, because the two groups competed with each other, as much as with Hinduism. Over time the Hindu religion prospered better. One factor was that, ever since the Buddhist Kushan Empire in the 2nd-century, the centre of Indian Buddhism had been the north-west, the region most exposed to the devastating invasions by various groups, beginning with the Alchon Huns. Another factor was that regional dynasties tending to favour Hinduism. The Brahmin priestly-classes were able administrators, had clearer ideas about statecraft, and could be more pragmatic than the Buddhists whose faith was based on monastic renunciation and abhorrence of violence. In a centuries-long process, Hinduism became the dominant religious tradition on the subcontinent, eclipsing Buddhism and Jainism. Of the two, the Jain community fared better. Their prohibition on taking any form of life obviously made agriculture or animal husbandry impossible, which meant that most followers tended to become merchants. In modern times the Jain community is one of the wealthiest in India. These changes matured only shortly before Islam arrived in the subcontinent, and provoke a sense of culmination and climax. Towards the end of the explosive first century of Islam In 712, Arab armies conquered Sindh, at the mouth of the Indus River (modern-day Pakistan). They got no further, gradually settled down and ceased to trouble the Indian peoples except as traders on the western coast. The Gurjara-Pratihara Empire (786-1036) of the north-western subcontinent were instrumental in containing the Arab armies. The Pratiharas were one of three dynasties contesting the so-called Tripartite Struggle from the 8th to the 10th century, for control over the resource-rich Ganges Valley, along with the Pala Empire (770-1023) of the north-east, and Rashtrakuta Empire (753–982) in west-central India. The power of the Pratiharas was weakened as a result of a great raid by the Rashtrakuta that sacked their capital of Kannauj in about 916. Afterward dynastic strife and political decline set-in, until its fragmented into various states before 1023, notably the Rajputs of Rajasthan, from the Sanskrit raja-putra ("son of a king"). Although claiming royal lineage, the origin of the Rajputs has been a much-debated topic among the historians; they seem to have comprised people from a variety of ethnic and geographical backgrounds. Gradually, the term Rajput came to denote a hereditary social class, which transformed into a landed ruling class. There arose a number of small kingdoms ruled by branches of the four major Rajput clans. Their fierce commitment to warfare, to deeds of honour, and a code of chivalrous conduct akin to knights of medieval Europe, caused the Rajputs to fight constantly among themselves, if no other enemies were available. This led to further chaos in north-western India, and made the Muslim incursion of the 11th-century relatively easy, with Ghazni Sultanate in the vanguard. But it also meant that the Rajputs would hold-out for several centuries against Muslim domination of northern India, either defeating them in battle or withdrawing to formidable desert fortresses in Rajasthan. Category:Historical Periods